This project
was the second showroom I designed for the client in the Pacific Design
Center, the premier location for amnufactuerers of commercial furnishings
and building materials in Southern California.

This tenant
space has a much better location of the building right at the top of a
main escalator bank.

The client
and I already had a highly productive working relationship from the sucess
of the previous showroom, which made communication faster and more productive--especially
since the American company headquarters is in North Carolina, and we could
only meet infrequently. The American company needed to obtain approval
for key decisions from its Swiss headquarters, so I had to present and
express design concept ideas very clearly for distant presentations.

The design
went though a number of iterantions and as it approached final approval
I built a scale model to show what the finished showroom would look like.
This model was expremely useful and accuratly depicted what the final
showroom would look like.

The project
was awared "Best new Showroom or Retail Store Design" by the
Los Angeles chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers in 1995.

This project
let me explore one of my favorite specialties--designing architectural
signage. At the conference area I receseed the Girsberger name into the
wall, so that it appears to be carved out of the wall itself, and specified
transparent blue letters with polished chrome faces for the words "Office
Seating" so that the words shimmer in and out of sight as the viewer
moves past them.

I incorporated
a motion picture lighting technique--directing highly specular brights
lights through translucent silk fabric--into the architecture. The result
is soft modeling on the black leather chairs without creating too much
contrast against the white wall behind them, as well as a visually dynamic
sculptural form floating over Girsberger's most upscale products.

This showroom
was the first of a series of projects I designed for Girsberger. The tenant
space was a typical "storefront" layout, long and narrow.

I borrowed
a number of techniques from the Renaissance to shorten the perspective
depth of the showroom. The repeated "Girsberger" signage suggests
that both signs are about the same size--actually the sign on the back
wall is much larger than the backlit sign over the reception desk. The
conference table at the rear of the space is over-scale, adding to the
illusion that the back wall is closer to the storefront than it really
is.

When the
more desirable location for the showroom became available two years after
the construction of this one, I designed the showroom shown at the top
of the page. I was able to re-use some furnishings from the original showroom
(the reception desk and conference table) saving some costs.

The 1992
showroom was named "Best New Commercial Product Showroom" at
that year's "Westweek" trade show hosted by the Pacific Design
Center.